Blog versus email as a communication tool
I get deluged with emails sent to me for my information, but that require no response.
So I couldn't help but notice what Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing at Attensa, had to say in a presentation at Enterprise 2.0, about drawing a distinction between 'what you need to know' and 'what you need to respond to.'
As paraphrased by Doug Cornelius, who attended Niesen's session:
A blog is a communication tool. It is well suited to what you need to know. Email is better for information that has a need to respond. Take a look at you email flow and think about how much of this you need to react to. Most of it is just information you need to know. But by the information being pushed into email, my inbox is acting as my content management system. A blog or a collection of blogs makes a much better content management system. It is easier to search, easier to find content and easier to add content.
Hear hear. Use a blog. Use a project management tool like Basecamp (basically a blog). Use a wiki. Use Google docs/spreadsheets for colaboration. But email for delivering information I need to know is distracting, oppressive, and impossible to keep track of.
Kevin,
Scott's a good friend of mine, and pretty brilliant marketer. He's right (as are several of your readers) - email's out of control. And (more importantly, as we move into the future) email isn't relevant to an entire generation of knowledge workers currently in schools around the globe.
Instead, they're texting, twittering, blogging and generally connecting in any way but email.
So as we begin to see these knowledge workers entering the workforce, their expectations are going to be very different from those of us who've built the web to date.
In fact, many "web 2.0"-type new media influencers are only taking pitches via Twitter; stating that if people can't make their case in 140 characters, they don't want to hear from them.
So we're beginning to see another huge shift - probably bigger than the one that moved us from pen and paper to PC and paper... all the way to PDA's.
Meanwhile, those of us who pretend to be professional communicators need to prove our flexibility, improve our productivity (through products like Attensa's - they're a client of mine as well) and give back to the community (as you've stated) by blogging using wikis, and sharing the wealth.
Kevin,
Scott's a good friend of mine, and pretty brilliant marketer. He's right (as are several of your readers) - email's out of control. And (more importantly, as we move into the future) email isn't relevant to an entire generation of knowledge workers currently in schools around the globe.
Instead, they're texting, twittering, blogging and generally connecting in any way but email.
So as we begin to see these knowledge workers entering the workforce, their expectations are going to be very different from those of us who've built the web to date.
In fact, many "web 2.0"-type new media influencers are only taking pitches via Twitter; stating that if people can't make their case in 140 characters, they don't want to hear from them.
So we're beginning to see another huge shift - probably bigger than the one that moved us from pen and paper to PC and paper... all the way to PDA's.
Meanwhile, those of us who pretend to be professional communicators need to prove our flexibility, improve our productivity (through products like Attensa's - they're a client of mine as well) and give back to the community (as you've stated) by blogging using wikis, and sharing the wealth.